Episode 228 (Transcript): Embracing Your Journey | A Conversation With Abby Maxwell Hansen

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener Erica Larsen for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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AH: I had three callings at the time that I put up my Ordain Women profile and everyone decided I was deceived by Satan. I was in the primary presidency, I was the compassionate service leader, and I was a ward missionary. And I was an awesome visiting teacher with a really great track record of getting my visiting teaching done every month.

I was doing everything, and that's why it's so frustrating then for people to turn around and say, “Oh, you just didn't have a testimony. You probably didn't even go to church.” 

And you're like, “I am giving my life for this organization.” 

SH: Right? 

AH: I'm trying so hard.

**Intro Music**

SH: Hello, I'm Susan Hinkley. 

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward. 

SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode is Embracing Your Journey, A Conversation with Abby Maxwell Hansen. 

Hello Abby. Welcome to the podcast. 

AH: Hi Cynthia. Hi Susan. It's nice to be here with both of you.

CW: Hey, thank you for being here. 

SH: We’re thrilled to have you. 

Could we start maybe by just having you introduce yourself? What would you like our listeners to know about you and maybe give a little context to this conversation. 

AH: Well, sure! I have long admired you guys doing a podcast. I thought you guys are fantastic voices for Mormon women, so I love that.

On my end, I was part of Ordain Women years ago and I led the first group into the Marriott Center. You know, into a priesthood session. I was part of, well, I was featured on a documentary, like a short documentary, that got nominated for a BAFTA. That was pretty cool. That's like a British Oscar if you don't know that.

SH: Right, right.

AH: And then I have been part of the Exponent II. I've been blogging –that (Exponent II) is a blog, a magazine, a retreat. It's a 50-year-old Mormon feminist organization, and I've been really involved with that for the last number of years. I blog at least monthly and write about Mormon feminism and my experiences there. And I run our blog Instagram page. And so that's kind of where a lot of people know me. If they know me, they either knew me from Ordain Women or they know me from Exponent II. 

SH: Yeah. I'm imagining that a lot of our listeners will see your name in the title and think, where do I know her from? And it's probably Exponent, is my guess.

AH: Probably.

CW: You're quite the prolific writer at Exponent, so I bet that's where most of our audience at least, has gone, “Hmmm… I’ve heard that name somewhere.”

AH: That's right. Abby has complained about something but it resonated with me. Sometimes people will compliment me or come up and say, “Hey I follow you.I read what you write, like on the internet and stuff.”

And I'll say, “oh, thank you. It's whatever I'm most mad about that month– I write about. I'm glad it resonates with you too.”

SH: I'm pretty sure you're already resonating for our listeners just saying that, so thank you for that. 

Cynthia's gonna lead us through the discussion today, so I'm just gonna throw it over to her. Take it away, Cynthia. 

CW: Well, Abby, this season we're talking about navigating change. And Susan and I don't have any statistics, but we kind of think, I don't know, maybe a third of our listeners are fully active. A third are maybe nuanced, somewhere in the middle, maybe attend here and there. And we are thinking maybe a third have stepped away from the church. And so we were wanting to get more of a variety of stories this season from women who have stepped away. And we just kind of wanna hear more about your whole story, the arc of your LDS life. So can we start there? Can we get a quick snapshot of your LDS life? And especially we'd love to hear specific stories or experiences that shaped your Mormonism.

AH: Sure. And you know, as you describe your audience, that describes kind of the Exponent II audience as well. We have Relief Society presidents and we have people who have left the church and been ordained into another church as a priesthood holder there, as bloggers and as readers. And I feel just as comfortable and at home with active Mormon women as I do with ex-Mormon women, because we all come from the exact same fundamental background. We have so much in common, whether you're active in the church, whether you've left the church. We have this crazy special experience that no one else in the world can even understand. Like, they don't know our terminology, they don't know our underwear issues, they don't understand our cultural things.

And so I wanna say –I'm speaking as someone who has stepped away from the church, but I feel so much connection to women who go every week. I live in Utah County, Utah, so my friends,my coworkers, and everyone are people who go to church every week. So I just wanna say I don't feel like I am anti-Mormon or anything like that. I am someone who has stepped away, but it still created who I was. 

You asked about a snapshot of my Mormon life so I'll just try to give you a real quick where I come from. My parents are both converts, both of them moved to Utah separately. Both of them joined the church separately. My dad got baptized into my mom's single adult ward and you know, it's a baptism so everybody from the ward shows up and afterwards they did open mic testimony bearing and my mom stood up and said, “I don't even know who this guy is that just got baptized. I'm just glad they're baptizing more men!” And my dad thought that she was funny. And anyways, they got married. And then I came into existence a few years later and I grew up in Davis County, Utah. I grew up in Syracuse if people know where that is. It was a very small Mormon town when I was growing up. 

And if people didn't grow up in this type of environment, like if you grew up in California or you grew up somewhere, you know, in Texas or something where your entire world wasn't Mormonism, I think it's hard to understand unless you experienced it. But my school teachers were also my primary teachers. Like, everyone belonged to the same religion and had the same belief. 

Sometimes I hear people who grew up in more nuanced homes or grew up outside of Utah and they say like, well, I always knew that like the prophet didn't always speak directly the words of God. Or you know, if I got a blessing from my home teacher, he might just be some dumb guy making something up. I didn't take it as like the literal word of God. 

But like when I would go to school on Monday and my elementary school teacher would teach me, like George Washington was the first president of the United States, and inside your body you have a heart and lungs and a liver and this is what they do, and here's a picture of what it looks like. I couldn't verify any of those facts. I just believed what the adults were telling me. And then I would go to church on Sunday and that same teacher would be my primary teacher and would say Joseph Smith was the first prophet and God talked to him. And women's roles are to be wives and mothers, and boys are supposed to have the priesthood and men are supposed to be the leaders. And these are your roles and this is what will make you happy in life. And like there was no differentiation between the two. That's the childhood I had and how I grew up.

And I think that's important for people to understand who sometimes are a little more critical of people for believing so fully and everything, right? I didn't try to go back and verify or dig deeper or follow my own instinct or my own dreams because I was told everything is fact and secular and religious was all mixed in.

So that's the childhood and the background I came from. 

CW: I never really connected those dots before. Thank you for doing that for us. That makes so much sense. If you have a teacher, one teacher, and they're telling you George Washington was the first president of the US and that same teacher is saying the prophet wants women to stay home and be moms.I was gonna say, the lines are blurred, but there are no lines. I was just gonna say, there are no lines there. 

AH: There aren't. And just like you never take a knife to your chest cavity and open it up to like, “is there really a heart and lungs in there? Is that really how my body works?” You know? You don't take a surgical knife to your religious beliefs and say, “I don't know that I'm comfortable with this.” You're just like, “It's just fact. It's just the way things are.” 

CW: Right. Well, Abby, I'm already sensing just a few minutes into this conversation why I love your articles and the Exponent. ‘Cause you're really good with metaphors. So that's a really good metaphor right there too about being able to open up your own chest and examine it. That gives a really good snapshot. I did not grow up in a very LDS community, growing up outside of Los Angeles. So I can't imagine. I mean, Susan maybe can imagine a little bit more of what you're talking about, but yeah, that's very foreign to me.

Well, do you wanna share any, are there any other experiences besides having your primary teachers also be your school teachers that maybe would've shaped you? Or should we go on? 

AH: Yeah, let's go on. ‘Cause I have a list; I made a list of several stories to tell about growing up. 

CW: Awesome. Well, when did you start experiencing a faith shift and was there like one thing? Were there many things? Did it happen in your childhood? Later on? Just tell us more about when things started to get shifty. 

AH: Well, things are constantly shifty, I guess. But I thought about multiple experiences I had growing up that kind of shaped me into a Mormon feminist. Because growing up I never would've called myself a feminist. Feminist was a bad word. So let me go through some stories for you. The first, I'll do it chronologically age wise. 

SH: Okay, perfect.

AH: The first one that I thought of was when I was a primary kid. I was, I'm gonna guess I was about eight or nine at the time. My primary class, my age group, had a group of very naughty boys. They were irreverent. They were disrespectful. They were so obnoxious. And it wasn't me. I should be very clear –I was super obedient, very quiet. I was the opposite of this. But this group of boys were just very rowdy and obnoxious. 

And one day I remember we had a substitute. It was the dad of one of the boys in the class, and he was teaching the class. And if I remember correctly, the boys were acting up as they always were. And he stopped the class, and I remember the boys were all sitting on one side together. The girls were all segregated to the other side. And he stopped the class. And he said, “You know what's cool? There could be a future prophet sitting in this class. What do you think about that?” 

And he said, “You know, President Benson, he named several prophets, President McKay, all these guys, President Brigham Young and President Le Lasher, or President Childs or President Oswald.” And he named some of these naughty boys and he almost like pointed to them, with the girls looking from their side of the class. And I get what he was trying to do –he was trying to make them think about bigger things than being obnoxious little boys. And he was trying to give them a purpose. Like “you could become so much more.”

And I remember being so pissed off in my little reverent, quiet Mormon girl heart. 'Cause I was like “Dwayne as the prophet?!?!? Or Nate?? Or Jeremy?!?!” I just remember being so grossed out by the thought of that. And I was like, if I had to grow up in church where Jeremy is the prophet someday, I will literally die. That is horrible. Now I didn't think of it as sexist in any way. It didn't occur to me to say like, we're cutting out the girls from this conversation. It just made me upset that he would even suggest they could be prophet someday. 

So, fast forward a few years, I think I was about 16 years old and I was in. I was doing everything right –I was reading my scriptures, praying, going to seminary, doing baptisms at the temple. I was probably class president. I was working so hard to gain a testimony and I kept coming up short. Like I would read the Book of Mormon, I would do Moroni’s promise, I would pray and I would wait for an answer with full faith that I would get it, and I would feel pretty much nothing. And I would have good experiences at church and I would feel the Spirit and I would like these things, but I could not get an answer that the church was true.

And I was really stressed out about this. I would be like, “Heavenly Father, I'm trying so hard to get this answer, and I'm getting old enough, I'm gonna move out of the house in a couple years. I'm doing everything. I'm bearing my testimony. I need to know that the church is true.”

And so I decided to go talk to my bishop and I remember grabbing him after sacrament meeting and asking if I could meet with him during the three hour block because I didn't want my parents to know that I was meeting with the bishop. I was afraid they'd think something –of course it would be a big deal and they'd think something was off. I was just going trying to gain a testimony. So I remember he said, “Yep, come on in. I'll meet with you during the third hour.”

So I skipped Young Women's. I went in and I talked to him and I told him, “You know, I'm trying to get a testimony. I don't have one. You know, what do I do?” And I don't remember anything he told me. I do remember he brought in his two counselors and gave me a blessing with his two counselors. And afterwards we were talking and I don't remember anything about the blessing either. It was probably pretty generic.

But what I remember was afterwards I was talking to these three men in the bishop's office as this little 16-year-old girl, and one of the counselors said, pointing at the bishop next to him, “You know what, Abby? See this guy right here, the Bishop, I don't know if you know this or not, but I grew up with him. We're the same age. I knew him when he was your age. And let me tell you something. He was not even coming to church when he was 16 years old. Like every once in a while he'd wake up and show up for a meeting, but he didn't go on his mission until he was almost 22 years old.”

And basically what the counselor was saying was like, “Look, this spiritual giant in front of you –the bishop. You are so far ahead of where he was when he was 16. Don't worry, you're not off track. You're doing fine.”  That’s what he was trying to tell me. Like, “This guy had to repent for a few years. Stephen, go on a mission and now he's the bishop” kind of a thing. 

And I remember. I knew that he was trying to comfort me by saying that, but that just hit me in such a frustrating way because I thought I would've liked to have heard them say, “You know what? The bishop was the same way when he was 16. He was doing all his meetings, going to the temple, doing church, reading his scriptures, and he also didn't have a testimony until he was a little older. It's okay, you're on the right track.”

But instead I heard, “Oh, this stupid boy is Jeremy grown up. And Dwayne as a 16-year-old. These same boys, they can be complete screw ups now and they might end up being your bishop down the road. That's fine.” And I just remember that's not the answer that I wanted. And it bothered me to be like, you know, I'm trying so hard. And the bishop was not trying hard when he was my age. 

So anyways the third one, I remember a seminary teacher in high school who was giving a lesson. I don't remember the context or the buildup to this, but I do remember him saying that once he had been at a setting where a general authority of some kind, maybe an apostle or something, was answering questions of news reporters and that a news reporter who was kind of antagonistic to the church had raised his hand and said, “When is the Mormon church going to finally have a woman prophet?”  And I remember that question had never even entered my mind at this point.

It was such an absurd question. I remember being confused why my seminar teacher was even bringing this up. I was trying to think of a way to describe how absurd this question sounded to me –It's as if my teacher had said, a reporter raised his hand and said, “When is the Mormon church gonna finally build a temple on the surface of the sun?” You know? It was such a stupid question. 

And my seminary teacher said a reporter had asked the general authority there and the general authority had said, “We will have a woman prophet when there is not one single worthy man left on the entire Earth. Then we'll have a woman prophet.” And my seminar teacher just shrugged.

Basically what he was saying was it's never gonna happen. Right? And he kind of went on and in my mind I thought, “First of all,” I remember thinking, “I can't believe that a general authority said it was even an option.” You know, like there's a one in a million chance. I'll say yes and people will be like, so you're saying there's a chance kind of a thing.

That's kind of what I heard. I was a little upset that a general authority had even said that there was a possibility that a woman, because I thought “That's not right. Like a woman couldn't ever be the prophet.” And also I'm looking back, I'm like, okay... I was internalizing that the least experienced, least qualified, least spiritually prepared, worst leader in the world who had a temple recommend, who didn't drink coffee, would be chosen over the most spiritual, the most qualified, the most prepared woman? On the entire planet, he would still be preferred in the eyes of God over any woman. And I saw that lots of other times, like a 19-year-old boy would be the branch president on his mission when there were a whole bunch of qualified adult women who've been in the church their whole life.

Any man is better than any woman. 

CW: Right.

AH: Okay. So the next story that I wanna tell was my senior year of high school. My stake created a calling for youth. I know that they were trying to teach us how the church works, how councils work. How you come together, the Relief Society president, the different leaders all come into a meeting, they do the research, they figure things out, they come, and then the bishop makes the final decision and they move forward.

So that's how councils work, right? And I know they wanted to teach us teenagers how the church works and to prepare us to be future leaders. And so my Stake called a Laurels Stake President and I can't remember what they called it, but like a Priests Stake President or something. And it was two Seniors and my friend was called as the Laurels President and I really admired her. She was just smart. She was an obvious choice for the calling, she was a natural leader. She was on top of everything. She was just a wonderful human being who worked really hard, was very reliable, like destined to be amazing, and I was called as her first counselor. 

Now the boy that they called to be the president of the priest group, he did not make any sense at all. He was semi-active. He was not a kid who I would've ever put into a leadership position at church. The only thing looking back that makes any sense to me is that the leaders saw potential in him and they were trying to reactivate him and get him ready for a mission and trying to give him responsibility. And the boys that they called as his counselors and secretary, they were people who made sense. They were like active boys, you know, who were on seminary council and like involved in stuff and came to church. 

So the year started and I don't even remember what we did. I think we planned things like youth conferences and dances and stuff. Our meetings would be on Sunday mornings and if I remember right, they would start at 7:30 on Sunday mornings 'cause they'd run about an hour and some of the stake leaders had 9:00am church. They wanted them to get back. 

And this boy, he came to like the first couple of meetings at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. And then he just stopped coming and we would show up for our meetings and about 10 or 15 minutes would pass and he still wasn't there. So a leader would go call his house, and this was before cell phones, this was in the 90s. The leader would go call his house and his brother would answer and be like, “He's still asleep.”

And they'd be like, “Can you go wake him up? He has a meeting right now.”

And they'd be like, “He's not waking up.”

And they'd be like, “Go tell him that somebody's gonna be at his house to pick him up in 10 minutes.”

He had a family that wasn't active and so his family wasn't getting him up and making him go to meetings.

It just became this frustrating experience and I remember thinking, “Am I the only one who thinks this is so irritating?” 

And then I overheard the president of the Laurels class talking to herself, like under her breath in the corner being like, “It's okay. Heavenly Father gave him this calling for a reason and you are supposed to learn to work with him.”

And I was like, “Oh! You hate him too! We all hate him. I'm not the only one.”

So anyways, I have this very distinct memory of us planning everything for something. We had come up with the ideas, the Laurels President had talked to the adult to come be the speaker or whatever it was, and we just needed to get final approval. And the way it worked was they wanted it to model adult councils. Our presiding priesthood holder, which was this boy, had to come and agree to what we had planned. I remember finally getting him into a meeting with his hair not even combed and he had thrown on his clothes because a leader had come over to pick him up. And I remember the leaders and I was just like, “How are we doing this with a straight face? This was so stupid.”

And I remember the stake leader saying to him like, “Alright, brother So-and-so or President,” whatever they called him. “Do you approve this theme for Youth Conference? Like, are we good with this?”

And I remember the boy looking like, are you serious? Like, I haven't been to any meetings. And he was like, “Okay. I guess.” Like even the boy realized how dumb it was. 

SH: Wow. 

AH: And, but the thing was if I had been in any other situation, if it had been like a school setting and we had said, “Well, everyone's done all the work, but we have to have a boy come approve it.” No one would've been okay with that. We would've been like, this is ridiculous. But because it was church and he had the priesthood and it was his priesthood calling, we all went along with it and we all accepted it. And I didn't think of the system again as being the problem at the time. I thought the problem was how dumb my stake leaders were, that they picked such a stupid boy to try to reactivate him. Again, all of these things would happen, but I didn't blame the system and I didn't think it was sexist. I just thought this was a frustrating moment. 

Then I went to BYU and I remember my freshman ward. I wanted to go on a mission. So bad. Like I had lots of long talks with Heavenly Father saying things like, “Why do I have to wait till I'm 21?” I had spent all my teen years with them building up missions for the boys and saying things like, “This will be the greatest two years of your life.”

And people coming back, you know, return missionaries coming back and saying, “This was the greatest two years of my life and here's all these amazing experiences.” And I knew that I would be a really good missionary. And I remember being like, “Heavenly Father, I don't even have to go anywhere cool. I will go to Boise, Idaho. I don't care. I just want to serve. I just wanna be part of this. I know I'll be good.”

And they said, “No, you have to wait.” At the time, you had to wait till you were 21 because they wanted the girls to get married. 

CW: Right. 

AH: And they hoped that I would be married and pregnant by the time I was 21. And being pregnant held exactly zero interest. In fact, that's wrong. It held negative 1 million interest. I did not want to be pregnant or having a baby. That was not what I wanted to do and I just wanted to serve. 

And so anyways, all of their pumping up the boys as teenagers to get ready for missions, they didn't realize that I was also listening and that I got really pumped up and was excited to go. And so my freshman ward all the boys were getting their mission calls, like boy, after boy, and I would be like, “Ugh, that dumb kid is getting a mission call and I can't go yet.”

And then I remember one day I was walking to campus and at the exact same time another boy from my dorms was walking to campus and it was a boy I didn't know very well. He really didn't participate very much in church stuff. And I was at every church activity –I went to extra church meetings! That was me. And we were walking to class and we were making small talk. And I said, “Oh, what class are you headed to?” 

And he said “Book of Mormon.” And he told me who the teacher was. And the teacher was a really cool teacher who had written books that I had read and stuff. 

And I said, “Oh my gosh, I love him! That's so cool that you're in his class.”

And he is like, “Ugh, I hate the class. I accidentally signed up for it. It's like an advanced book of Mormon class. You're supposed to have been a return missionary to get in it. And I've never even read the Book of Mormon.”

And I remember he said that and I was like, like the record scratch moment.

SH: Yeah. 

CW: Yes.

AH: Cause this boy was about to get his mission call and I was like, you've never even read the Book of Mormon and you're about to get a mission call. And I just remember being like, “Seriously, Heavenly Father, you're gonna send this boy who hasn't even read the Book of Mormon on a mission before you'll send me.” And I was just so aggravated with that. And all these boys went.

So I hit somewhere along this point in life –I can't even place exactly when because I had this feeling multiple times. But I remember talking about the priesthood, talking about men, talking about being called of God, and I remember having this distinct feeling come over me where I thought, “Do guys actually like girls?” I didn't say it out loud or verbalize it to anyone. But I remember a lot of people were getting married, I was at BYU, and men would say, “I'm in love with her. I want to marry her.” Or you know, people would be like, “Oh, I have a crush on this girl in my biology class” or something. 

And I thought, Is that actually true? Or are they just saying that because why would guys like girls? Why would men like women? Like I get that, like to have a family and to go to the celestial kingdom, but like, I don't really think women are that interesting. Like I think about General Conference talks or something –I loved hearing from the Apostles. Men were interesting and phenomenal and they were leaders and I would learn from them. But then the general Primary President would come on to talk and I'd be like, “Eh, go to the bathroom or something. Or get a snack or zone out.” 

And if you'd asked me like, “Do you want a general church leader to come and speak to you?” I would be super stoked about a male general authority, but if I found out it was the general Relief Society president, I would be like, “Eh, she's not that interesting.”

And so I just remember hearing men say, “I'm deeply in love with this woman.” 

And I'm like, “Are you just saying that? Like don't you want men for your actual friendships and advice and wisdom and interaction and then a woman to go have kids with?”

And maybe part of that was because I was a straight girl and I thought boys are so fun and cute and interesting and girls…yeah.

But I look back at that and I'm like, “Oh! That was internalized misogyny where I had internalized that women were not as good as men.” 

SH: Right. Right. 

AH: So anyways, that happened around that time. And then I got married when I was 21 and I went to the temple. And the two things that stood out to me when I went through the temple the first time that caught me off guard were –back then when I went through, we had to covenant to Harken to the council of our husbands. Am I saying that right? 

CW: Yep. 

SH: Yep.

AH: If I have a word or two off... But I remember I had to bow my head and say, yes. And you don't have, there was no preparation back then. There was no internet to look anything up on or anybody whispering a work.

CW: What year was this?

AH: It would've been 2002 that I went through the temple.

SH: Okay. Okay. 

AH: And so I had absolutely no idea that was coming. And I remember just saying,”Oh. Harken to my… is he gonna harken to me? I'm not sure. Well, I guess that makes sense. He is the priesthood leader.”

CH: Yeah. 

AH: Oh, you know, kind of thing. And then the other thing that caught me off guard was on our wedding day when they said, “You as the wife to be, you have to tell your new name to your husband. And he is not allowed to tell you his.”

And I just remembered kind of feeling weird and being like, “Okay, I, I get why I would give my special secret temple name to my husband. But why not just like he doesn't tell you. It's like he is forbidden from telling you. 

CW: Right. 

AH: Like that very first day of our marriage, he's told, “Keep secrets from your new wife.” And that just felt uncomfortable. And there are lots more sexist things to be uncomfortable with in the temple, but I hadn't even caught onto them at that point. But those two things stood out to me –I was thinking about on these experiences and the thing is, I realized every woman growing up in the church has these experiences over and over again.

And I have had thousands of these experiences and 99.9% of them I don't even remember 'cause you just can't remember that much stuff. Like every single time I went to church, I had some type of message, whether it was really overt or whether it was just like sitting down at conference and they didn't come out and say women's voices aren't as important, but all of the speakers were men except for two. And you know, implied or overtly stated, I just got that message over and over again that women 

CW: We all did 

AH: Yeah, we all did. That women are not as important as men. And the thing that's confusing is you have all of these experiences growing up, like building your foundation of what you believe in the world and you're simultaneously being told that you are actually the luckiest women in the world to be growing up in the LDS church because no women are as respected by men. If you go outside of the LDS church, men just do not respect women. It was so confusing to hear like these very different messages being packaged that way. And when I thought back at all these feelings, every one of those incidents I remember I felt, at the time I would've said I felt frustrated or sad or mad or irritated by how everything was happening. But I couldn't really place the right word for it. Until this week I was thinking about these experiences and I thought, you know what the right word is? I felt degraded. 

CW: Yeah. 

AH: It was a degrading experience. Every time something like this happened. And as I was feeling degraded inside, I was going and hearing the message that this is not degrading, this is elevating women. 

When I was finally old enough and my brain had fully developed and I was finally able to put things together. It was when Ordain Women came onto the scene in 2013 that I heard their message and I saw them as a lot of very intelligent, bright, capable women who were stepping up and saying, “Hey, we want to make the church a better place for women. We want to move forward and ask the prophet about giving equality to women. Asking our prophet to pray to Heavenly Father and ask him if it's time to ordain women, just like we didn't use to ordain black men. And that change, we want to add the prophet ask God, is it time to look into, you know, society has changed? Can we elevate women in the church the same way women are being elevated in the rest of society?”

And it just resonated with me and it made all these puzzle pieces kind of click into place. And I imagine a lot of listeners were probably not supportive of working women back in the day. I bet a lot of them were so turned off because there were a lot of messages that went around back then that said these are anti-Mormon women. They are just dumb and don't understand how the gospel works. But I found these to be the most impressive women I had ever interacted with in the church, and I wanted to be like them. That's what pulled me into the Ordain Women movement and made me participate in it. 'cause I was like, “Yes! These are the women in my church that I've always wanted to be a part of,” and that resonated with me.

So anyways, that's kind of what brought me, it was so many experiences like that growing up.

CW: Yeah, that's a lot of experiences.

AH: Yep. And then someone finally put it together for me. And maybe that's one reason why I still enjoy blogging and talking about these things so much is because of other women back then, the Ordain Women, talking about these experiences and issues are what helped me put together what had been uncomfortable my whole life and helped me move forward.

It was someone finally explaining to me, George Washington and Joseph Smith are not the same thing.

CW: Right. 

AH: You know, kind of thing. 

SH: Right. 

AH: It was someone finally like doing that for me. And so for me, maybe it's a way of like paying it onto the next group of women who are having the same frustrations I was having and that need someone to voice it in a way that they can start to put the puzzle pieces together of their life of why they've been uncomfortable their whole life and why they've had problems with things.

So I think that's a big reason why it means so much to me to still blog and still be a voice because I know what it felt like when I didn't have a voice. And now that I have stepped away from the church, I'm not scared to use my voice anymore. I was scared and constantly under the threat of church discipline and now that I've stepped away, I can talk about these things openly and women can read them and hear them openly without being afraid that they will get in trouble. And I am grateful to be in a place where I can do that for other women. 

CW: Wow. There's a lot there. Abby, there's so many times I wanna, I just kept wanting to interrupt you and say, “Me too, Abby. Me too.” 

Because I can look back on my own LDS life. I kept thinking as you were speaking about the boy who had to be dragged outta bed to get to a meeting. And you trying to talk to your bishop about, “I just don't know yet that the church is true.” I kept thinking of that phrase, we reap what we sow.

And I'm like, here's Abby, and here was Cynthia sowing and sowing, right. Reading our scriptures and driving to meetings. And I was in a similar position to you. I mean, I would have to take two different freeways to get to a stake meeting. I'm like 16 years old, I'm taking this Stake President calling, kind of like what you were describing, very seriously. And the boy in charge isn't, and yet they're deferring to him. Anyway, I could go on and on with all the parallel stories I have, and I just felt like I was the kid who was sowing. But in the end, it's only the boys that get to reap.

AH: Yes.

CW: But I didn't see it as sexism either. And it wasn't until also as an adult woman I could look back and I could finally give words to what I had been experiencing, which is just what you were explaining, internal misogyny. 

SH: I wanna ask you a follow-up question, Abby. If that's okay. 

AH: Sure. 

SH: As I hear you talking, the question that occurs to me is whether you felt at liberty in your life to say any of these things out loud as you were going along.

Because it seems to me by the time you get to Ordain Women, you were willing to step into that space. But I think there are a lot of women who may have identified with the Ordain Women movement, but didn't feel at liberty in their lives to openly embrace that. And so I'm just wondering did you always feel comfortable expressing these things out loud or was there a point at which you suddenly decided “I have to talk about these things.” And it just came out. 

AH: So I definitely did not always feel comfortable speaking about these things. It was terrifying. It was so hard. And I would never blame anyone who has the same type of feelings I had for not speaking about it, because I completely understand.

I reached a point where I was in so much pain, on a weekly and daily basis. I was in so much pain, I couldn't handle it anymore. I told a friend of mine once… You were saying I'm good at analogies, Cynthia. This was the analogy I use. I said, Heavenly Father knew, and this was what I was still trying to do. I was less agnostic than I am now and I was still really trying to hold onto a belief in God. And I said, Heavenly Father knew that I would never willingly do any of this, I would never stand up and leave the church. I would never speak out loud about it, unless he literally sent a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, a volcano, etc. directly onto me to make me so uncomfortable I had to move or I would die.

And that's how I felt when I reached the point of Ordaining Women and speaking up. It was like there was no other option. I couldn't survive another minute without doing it. And I remember things like, I remember putting up my ordaining women profile and then going to the gym the next morning and being terrified to go to my gym that I had been going to for years and years with all of my friends because I thought everyone here will hate me. Because I really do live in a very Mormon community. I remember I had like a group of army wife friends that we had been very close since our husbands had all deployed at the same time. Years ago when my first baby was born and my husband was deployed, they'd been a big part of my life. They were all very Mormon. And I remember thinking, “Oh, they're not gonna be my friends anymore. I've lost that friend group.” I just remember thinking, “Everything is falling apart. Everything will collapse. But I am in so much pain.” 

CW: It was worth it. 

AH: I wouldn't even have said that at the time. Yeah, I would say it was worth it. Like I would do it over again in a heartbeat. 

CW: Gotcha. 

AH: I am so proud of everything I did. I look back at myself, 'cause people always said to me, “You're gonna regret all of this. You're gonna regret Ordain Women. You're gonna repent, you're gonna, you know, change.” And I look back and I'm like, I am so proud of myself. I look back at 30-year-old me who was –trying to grasp and figure out what was going on. And I'm like, please tell these stories at my graveside service. Tell this to my grandchildren. Tell this everyone, I am so proud of myself for standing up and saying these things out loud. So yes, 100% worth it.

But it was terrifying. It was awful. And I cried all the time and it was one of the hardest things I ever went through. And I love the human being that I became because I followed my internal compass. For me, standing up for these things has… if I had not, I don't know who I would be today.

I don't think I would be a terrible person. But I am so proud of having done it, but it was so hard. 

SH: And how was it received by the people that you were close to in your life?

AH: I mean, not amazingly well, as you can imagine. A few people here and there over the years. I should say, as the years go by, more and more people come and say, “Oh my gosh, I judged you so much back then.”

But at the time, like I'll say my mom, she passed away at the beginning of last year, so I can talk about her. I remember her telling me that she had direct revelation that all of this was from Satan and that I was being controlled by Satan. And I just remember, so many people in my life getting angry at me. My father-in-law came over and was really mad and said, “You've been lying to us” and stuff. And then we just kind of moved on. Like, I have a good relationship with my father-in-law now, but we've never talked about that. We've never cleared the air on that.

There's a lot of painful experiences, but it was more painful to just keep pretending that everything was okay when it wasn't. 

CW: I can't imagine what it would be like to have your own mama say, ”I've had a revelation that this is from Satan.” Because what is that saying about your association with it? Those dots to connect are not very far apart when she's saying something like that. I can only imagine. How painful that was. I'm so sorry. 

AH: It's hard. It was very painful. And so I guess maybe I'm saying this… not to say everyone is going to be like this if you come out as a Mormon feminist, but you're not alone. If someone listening, if this has happened to you, you're not alone. 

And I remember one of the most painful experiences was seeing someone on Facebook post an article making fun of Ordain Women and saying how awful they were. And then seeing my mom, this was someone we had in common as Facebook friends, my mom in the comment saying like, amen about it.

I remember that being a moment that broke me because it was like, “Your daughter is like one of the public faces of this movement and you are excited and supporting a really mean article about it.” And I just like, those are moments that define you. 

For me, even having stepped away from the church, I have found such a home in Mormon feminism, even if I would no longer consider myself an active, believing Mormon. Feminism is the place where I have found community and friendship. And a lot of women who understand what I went through, and I don't think I will ever be able to find that anywhere else. And that's why I stick around. That's why lots of women stick around in Mormon feminism, even if they've moved on from the church, we're still processing these experiences from primary. 

SH: Right, right. 

AH: We're still going through all of this together and it takes a lot of deconstruction and talking about it. And years of work and putting a hand out to the next group of women who are having a faith crisis and being like, “It's okay. We've been there. Our mom has called us Satan too. Your life isn't gonna end over this. We understand. Don't worry, you're not a bad person and we understand why your mom is doing that. We'll be there for you.” 

CW: We have so many women that Susan and I interact with, whether it's through like our Substack chat or women who email us or we've met at retreats or whatever, and they say, “Nobody knows. There's not one single person. You are the only women I can share this with. There's not one single person.”

And yet here you are, Abby, telling these stories about, you know, having this experience with your mom and seeing how she reacted to others on Facebook or whatever. And it's like, for good reason. Like there is a good reason plenty of women choose to stay quiet the whole time. 

But like you were saying, and I know Susan's talked about many times on the podcast –When the pain of silence becomes greater than the pain of finally saying something, that's when the shift happens and when you start to find your voice.

And I just wonder for how many women, this is such a common theme for them. The pain of staying quiet became too great.

AH: And the only way to keep breaking the silence is for us to talk about these things publicly. 

CW: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Abby I've loved all the stories that you've shared so far and we've had a good conversation about them.

But can you tell us, was there one particular time, an experience where finally the weight of what you had been putting on the shelf broke? We'd love to hear about that. 

AH: Yeah. So there are many shelf breaking moments, I think, in any woman's life for many different experiences. I thought today, since we only have limited time, I would talk about my shelf breaking experience with the temple. Because I tried so hard for so many years to make the temple work. And I would go and it would be confusing, and I would be bored and I would fall asleep, and I'd be like, well, the answer is to go more. So I would go more and I would be more bored and more confused and more sleepy.

And I remember the year 2011 was a big year for me with a faith transition… I guess a faith crisis. That's when everything started falling apart. I remember my husband was deployed that whole year in Iraq. 

CW: Wow. 

AH: I remember starting that year with a full testimony, and by the time he came home, everything was in shambles.

So at the time they had a childcare program that they had just started for wives of deployed spouses where you could drop your kid off for three hours a week and the military would cover three hours of daycare a week so that a stay-at-home mom or the spouse that stayed at home could have a break from kids.It kind of worked. But I found a daycare that was willing to do that and I had three hours a week to myself without little kids. And I used that three hours to drop my kids off and drive to Salt Lake to an institute class that was taught by S. Michael Wilcox. I don't know if you guys are familiar with him or not –He's written a zillion books for Desert Book. I still think very highly of him. I think he's a very smart, very nice guy, although I haven't followed him for a while. But I would go to this institute class. It was one that he taught mostly to old people. It was me, a young mom in my twenties, and everyone else was over 75.

A lady in my ward who had gone to that class told me about it and I started joining them and I loved his class. And when I was going at the beginning of 2011, he was covering the Old Testament and we were in the most boring parts of the Old Testament. It was like Judges and Numbers. And I would go to his class and I would leave with this incredible uplift of, “Oh my gosh, I love the scriptures, I love Judges and stuff.” Because he would bring this meaning to stuff that had been so confusing and boring. He would bring it alive and I would be thinking about it all week long.

And I was sitting there one day talking to some of the older women after or before, and one of them said, “Oh, I was at the temple and I saw Brother Wilcox. He was there.” And they were all saying, “Wouldn't that be so cool to just be able to sit in the Celestial room and talk to Brother Wilcox and ask him about everything?”

And I remember thinking, “Oh, if he can turn Judges and Numbers into something amazing, what could he do for the temple ceremony?” 

Then that same Saturday morning I went on a Relief Society temple trip and it was me and the Relief Society presidency. 'Cause I was the above and I was the one who showed up for everything.

CW: Above and beyond.

AH: Yes. That was me. So it was me and the three women in the Relief Society presidency. We did our Relief Society temple trip and I was sitting, it was reaching that boiling point. I was talking about like where you get to the point where the pain of staying silent is, so intense you finally have to say something. I was sitting and watching this movie in the temple and I was like, “This whole thing is full of so many plot holes. It doesn't even make sense. Like what?” And I was about to explode. 

And we walked out and we all ended up in the celestial room and I was standing with these three women in the Relief Society presidency, and I was about to burst. And one of them gently looked up and said, “Oh, the curtains are so beautiful in here, aren't they?” 

And I remember that comment just broke me because I was like, “The curtains??? Is that why none of us talk about the temple and none of us discuss any of this stuff –because the curtains are so all consuming??”

And so I just all of a sudden word vomited over these women who were my friends. And I said, “Do you guys ever wonder about things like …blah, blah, blah. This doesn't make any sense.” And I started like just knocking off all these questions I had about the Temple movie and the story. 

CW: And this is in the temple still, right?

AH: This is in the temple, in the celestial room because it's the only place you feel like you could talk about it at all. And these three women who were my friends, they all just said, “I've never thought about that before. That's a good question. I don't know.”

And I was like, “None of you have ever thought this? I thought everyone was thinking the same thing as me.”

And one of them said, “You know what would be really cool if we had a ward temple night?” 

You know, this guy in our ward who happens to be my very dear friend in the ward, like someone that I actually was very close to and who was an important person in my life, his dad is in the temple presidency here. And somehow I had never even thought about that. I was like. “Oh yeah. I have a very direct connection to a member of the temple presidency.”

And the Relief Society sister, she said, “We should have a ward temple night where we all meet with the dad and ask all these questions. I wanna hear the answers too.”

And so I went to my friend that Sunday, the next day and he said, “Oh yeah, I'll ask my dad. Absolutely.”

Well, he came back after talking to his dad and said, “Oh actually, my dad says we don't do that type of a thing with a ward.”

SH: Wait. What?

AH: He said, “Because everybody is at a different place spiritually and they don't wanna, you know… but you can go individually. Anytime you want to go into a member of the Temple Presidency's office and ask all the questions you want. But we don't do a group thing like that.”

And I was like, “Okay, well that's weird.”

 

And then that friend and his wife were going to the temple and they invited me along to go with them and said, “You know, you can go talk to his dad after a temple session.”

I remember the date because it was one of my kids' birthday –It was April 13th, 2011. 

CW: Wow. 

AH: They called me and said, “We're going to the temple tonight. Do you wanna come?”

And I said, “Yes, I will come.” 

'Cause they thought, “Oh, she'll probably be too nervous to go in by herself.” Which is not true. I would've absolutely gone in by myself –I was past that point.

I went through a session with my friends and then afterwards his wife and I went. And it turned out that my friend's dad was not there that night. It was like Wednesday night and he had Wednesday night off or something. They have alternating nights off. And they said, “That's okay. You could talk to any member of the presidency.”

They just wanted to be there as my support, I guess. The temple presidency was all gone, but they said that actually the temple recorder is still here and he is just as good as the temple presidency. 

SH: Oh, really? Oh, Cynthia had this experience.

AH: No way! Well you'll have to tell me about it later. So anyways, I went in and here's the deal. I had been building this up. I had been praying and talking and begging Heavenly Father to help me figure out the temple for so long. It's just like when I finally said, “I'm gonna go meet with my bishop,” when I was sixteen 'cause I can't get a testimony. I was like, “I'm showing Heavenly Father, I will do anything to find the answers to these questions.” When I'd had that moment, after the curtains moment and the word vomit in the celestial room when the woman said, “Oh, —--- 's dad is in the temple presidency.”

 It felt like Heavenly Father was saying, “See, Abby, I have you. I got you. I'm gonna give you the answers to all of these questions. It's gonna be like sitting down with S. Michael Wilcox in the temple. You're gonna get all of your answers. Don't worry. Abby, thank you.”

Like, it was like, “I love you. You have worked so hard your whole life. I am going to give you these answers.” And then even when it came down to it, my friend's dad wasn't there that night. The whole temple presidency had already left for the night, but the temple recorder was there. And they said the Temple recorder is exactly the same as a member of the temple presidency.

He can answer your questions. I remember thinking, “Heavenly Father has arranged everything so that I'm talking to the right person. It's the temple recorder I'm supposed to talk to.” 

And I had brought a whole page of questions and I came in with so much faith. And just to give you an idea, these were not questions about sexism. They were not deep doctoral questions. They were questions like, just to give you an example of one, I was like, “Okay, so explain this to me. They're in the Garden of Eden and Satan comes in and they eat the fruit and there's this whole traumatic thing where they get kicked out of the garden. This is a very big event in Adam and Eve's lives – Everything hinges on this moment. And then like two minutes later they're walking around and Satan pops up again and Eve's like, ‘Who aren't thou?’ How did she not remember who he was? Like, did you forget what happened two minutes ago?” It was questions like that where I was just like, all of these plot holes don't make any sense. Explain them to me. 

And every question he would say, “Well that is not important to your salvation.”  Of course he said that so many times and then he would give me scriptures to read. He'd be like, “Read this scripture in Genesis.”

And I was like, “Sir, I am the scripture chase champion of Clearfield High School of the nineties. I have read all of these scriptures. I can quote them back to you. I don't need scriptures to read. I'm actually asking you – I'm wanting an S. Michael Wilcox explanation so that I can have a deeper understanding.” And I was starting to cry across the table.

And this was a long meeting. It was going like an hour –Over an hour. It was getting close to 10 o'clock at night. And I remember being like, I'm not even gonna bother asking my last questions. And as this hour and a half meeting went on, I went from being so wide-eyed and excited to finally have the answers or not even have to have the answers, but just to have something more to go off of after all my years of going to the temple and not understanding or getting anything out of it.

And I just remember like the enthusiasm starting to drain out of my body and starting to realize, “Oh, there are no answers to any of this. He doesn't have answers to any of this. The answer that I'm getting from Heavenly Father is there are no answers. Nobody knows what's going on. There's no great moment of understanding and awakening you're gonna have. Nobody has answers.”

 

And I remember leaving that meeting and that, I would say, was my shelf break moment for the temple. Cause I went home that night and I put my list of questions next to my bed and I thought that was my answer. My answer was there is no answer. And my time with the temple did not extend a ton past there.

I had a temple recommend. The very last time I went was the fall of 2013, and I remember sitting in a temple session and I was crying. I was crying because now I was seeing all the sexism. I was seeing all the things. I was remembering that, you know, just a couple years before I had realized there were no answers. There was no deeper meaning. 

CW & SH: Right, right. 

AH: It didn't make any sense and nobody knew what it meant. And now I was starting to see all of the sexism and all of these things. I was crying so hard during the endowment session. And I remember looking over at another woman who was crying and seeing her tears and thinking, “Man, look at her! She's having a spiritual experience here and I'm over…” And then I remember thinking in the moment to myself, “Wait a minute, people are probably looking at me thinking I'm having a spiritual experience! Maybe she's having the same internal breakdown that I'm having right now, but I'm just assuming.” 

CW: We didn't know.

AH: And I sort of think we don't talk to each other. We don't talk to each other. We don't know. We just assume someone crying is crying 'cause they're feeling the spirit. So I was having this rage breakdown in myself and I was like –This is not out loud, this is me crying silently –But in my head screaming, “I effing hate this place. I effing hate all of this. This is a bunch of effing…” 

Anyways, there were a whole bunch of swear words. I'm editing from my brain in the temple in 2013 to your podcast. I'm editing for you guys. 

I was sobbing so hard and I got into the celestial room and I was crying in there too, and I just wanted to get out of there. I just wanted to rip everything off and run out. And I was thinking to myself, I'm gonna throw all my clothes in a bag and throw them at a temple worker and be like, “I am never coming back here again. You keep these.” That was like where I was. 

And a temple worker came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder, saw me crying, and he said, “Sister. Heavenly Father is so grateful to have you in his temple today.”

CW: Wow. 

AH: And I remember thinking, “Heavenly Father is glad that I'm screaming the F word in my head in his temple today??” Anyways, I left. I stopped. That was the last time I ever went to the temple. 

The thing is, I've realized my experience there is not unique. I have had so many other women share that with me. “You know, like, well, I've never talked about this, but the very last time…”

I knew the last time I went to the temple where I was like, I am not getting anything out of this. Now I want to say. If you are someone listening to this podcast who does find peace and joy in the temple, who does love serving there, I am so happy for you. I would not take that away from anyone. I just don't want anyone to feel like they're crazy if they don't find that peace and joy in the temple. We are all different people, and it's okay if you have that moment where you walk away and say, “The temple's not for me.” That's one of the greatest, most peaceful things I ever did for myself –when I walked away and said, “That doesn't serve me. I'm never going back again.” But I didn't throw my clothes at the temple worker. I felt bad. She had nothing to do with this whole experience. I won't traumatize her. 

SH: What's so striking to me about that as you tell it, is that while this unraveling is happening for you. You are still doing more than all the things.

AH: Yes. 

SH: I mean, you're the person who has three hours a week away from your children and chooses to go to an institute class. 

CW: Right. 

SH: And I just feel like there are so many misconceptions among members of the church about what's going on with someone when they're struggling.

CW: Right. 

SH: You know, and all of those misconceptions put the blame on the person who's struggling. And I just feel like your story really illustrates so clearly that nobody could have wanted those answers more than you did. Your desire was genuine. 

AH: You know, you are reminding me of the fact that when I put up my Ordain Women profile and this is like not even worth going into in the amount of time we have, but I ended up having a bishop who just lost his mind and gave me a whole bunch of church discipline. It was very traumatic. The most traumatic experience of my life looking back was this time. And what happened was I had three callings at the time that I put up my Ordain Women profile. And everyone decided I was deceived by Satan. I was in the primary presidency, I was the compassionate service leader, and I was a ward missionary and I was an awesome visiting teacher with a really great track record of getting my visiting teaching done.

Every month I was doing everything. And that's why it was so frustrating then for people to turn around and say, “Oh, you just didn't have a testimony. You probably didn't even go to church.” 

And you're like, “I am giving my life for this organization! I'm trying so hard.”

CW: Right. 

AH: You're right. That's a misconception people have that needs to be done away with. The people who lose their faith are often the people who are trying the hardest and want it to work the most and love it the most. 

CW: Right. 

AH: And I feel bad as I'm thinking about this, I'm telling a story about 2011 and you probably have listeners who are newly in their faith crisis or their faith transition and they're like, “Whew, probably a year from now things will have settled down.”

And here I am almost 15 years later being like, “And now I'd like to cry about the primary activity that happened when I was seven.” But I would say it takes as long as it takes. 

SH: It does. 

AH: Because this is how our lives –we built our entire foundation on it. And it is a lot to deconstruct. 

SH: Yeah, I feel like that kind of timeline perspective is actually really valuable for women in this space because I think a lot of people move into this space and they think “I want this to be resolved. I need to decide all this. I wanna know what I think about God next week. I gotta have this settled right now.”

And Cynthia and I are always quick to point out that we've been at this a long time and that this is a moving… you've stepped onto a moving conveyor belt. This is a journey, this is a process.

And it's gonna keep going for the rest of your life in some way. Hopefully you're always going to be continuing to move on this stuff. And so I feel like a story like yours, Abby is such a perfect illustration of this. It gives women a place to grab onto this who maybe really weren't sure that they would find a place or how long that was meant to take. The answer is there is no expiration date on this stuff. You can still be mad about the primary activity from 1998 and need to talk about that today.

AH: Oh, I’m not nearly that young. It was from the eighties. 

SH: Okay, good. Glad to hear that because I got baggage from the seventies. 

AH: You know what, I will say something for me personally  –it's scary when you're going through a faith crisis where you're like, “What if I, what if God isn't real? I don't know what to hold onto?”

And it can feel very unsettling and terrifying. And I will say for me,15 years out from when my faith crisis really started ramping up, I have so much peace in not knowing. I was talking to you guys before we started recording –I work inside of a funeral home. I love my job. Our funeral home used to be a church and I work in the old Bishop's office. It's a beautiful remodeled office. So I come to work, I'm recording from my bishop's office right now, but I see death every single day. I walk by bodies, on my way in through the employee door, who are getting ready.

And my mom died last year. And people say “Oh, but how would I deal with death? You know? How would I deal with that?” And I'm dealing with it; I'm helping families every day who have just lost someone who died, and I have so much more peace around things like death, for example, than I ever did when I was a believing active member of the LDS church.

I have come to accept that I don't know. I don't know what's gonna be beyond, I don't know who controls things. The best way I've ever heard how I feel now as a post Mormon woman describing my religious beliefs is someone said, “I am a hopeful agnostic.” And I'm like, that is me because it means I have no idea. I used to think I was certain and I will never say because atheism doesn't work for me. That's saying, “I know there is no God.”

CW: Right. 

AH: Agnosticism says, “I have no idea. There's no way of knowing. Nobody can know who knows what's out there.” And I'm a hopeful agnostic 'cause I'm hopeful. Like there feels like there's something, I feel like we are all connected. I feel like things come into my life when I need them. I feel like the world is a beautiful place. I feel like there is goodness. I'm a hopeful agnostic. And you know what? Like when we die –just speaking of death for example. When we die, maybe we die and we close your eyes and it's like going to sleep and it's all over. And I'm fine with that –that's okay with me. I don't know that I wanna live forever. And I deal with a lot of very elderly people who are like, “I don't wanna be around in 10 years. I'm tired. I'm 90. I don't wanna make it to a hundred.” 

And I look at them and I'm like, “It's not sad. You're happy. You lived a long life.” 

My mom died last year  –is that what happened? I haven't really felt her presence or anything. She had 75 years on Earth and now she's asleep. I'm not sad when I fall asleep at night and I'm not conscious during those times. I wake up in the morning, I'm always like, “Oh, I wanna go back to sleep.” Not like, get up and live my life. I imagine that's how death might be. You know, it's just peaceful and you're done. But guess what? I have no idea. That is the great adventure. Someday I will die. I don't know when. And maybe there is something beyond this life  –how exciting to find out what it really is.

I don't believe it's a celestial kingdom as a plural wife of an exalted Mormon man. You know, I don't believe that anymore. But could there be something? Sure. And if there's not, eh, that's okay too. I. When I was worried about things like being an eternal polygamist or something, there were a lot more things that stressed me out.

CW: Yeah. 

AH: Thinking that I knew what my future would look like than not knowing. I just feel happy for every moment that I have instead. 

CW: Well, and it kind of strikes me, I know there's no way to look at your life and say, “if I had never been a believer or if I had never been part of a high demand religion, you know, I maybe always would have been comfortable with death.”

I think what I hear you describing is because we have a narrative in our church where everything is so laid out for the next life down to like the divisions and the kingdoms, and within the top kingdom there are divisions with that. And if you do this, you get this. And if you don't, you do this. And if you have children here, but if you don't have a husband, you could go here.

I mean, it's so specific. That I feel, tell me if this is true Abby, that actually when the pendulum swinging the other way into mystery is actually really comforting. 

AH: Yeah. Like if you had told me when I was a believing active member that it would be more comforting and more peaceful to not know what was gonna happen when I died, I would've thought that's impossible.

I want to know like how terrifying that I might just never exist again. That sounded awful. But once I stepped away, I have so much more inner calm and inner joy than I did when I had those rigid beliefs. 

SH: Same. 

AH: And it's hard to explain to someone who's very scared of death. The thing is I sometimes feel we think we can only get our beliefs from an institution like the church.

Like we have to find a church to give us a new set of beliefs. Beliefs are all invisible. Pretty much made up things –make up whatever you want your belief in the afterlife to be. 

CW: Right. Beliefs should be the most personal, intimate thing that we get to be in charge of, right? That we share or don't share.

Well, Abby we've run out of time, but we love to ask all of our guests what is one thing that you know right now today? 

AH: Sure. I was thinking about what I know, and I will say the church, the LDS church or any church or religion does not own spirituality or your spiritual experiences. I know some people who have stress and frustrations and are unhappy in the church, but they think I can't leave though because of my spiritual experiences. Like every time I go to the temple, I feel my mom and I don't fill my mom's presence anywhere else other than the temple I can't leave. You will find when you leave the church, if you do, when you step away, you will have all of the same spiritual experiences.

You might call them something different. If you love praying and you love prayer, you can leave. It will turn into your morning meditation and you will get all the same benefits and all of the same happiness that you got from praying with that. When you think, “Oh my gosh, the Holy Ghost has alerted me to things before, or let me know when I needed to visit one, or help or someone or helped me with stuff,” the Holy Ghost will become your own intuition.

You'll have those promptings that you always had and you called it the Holy Ghost, but now you'll call those promptings your own intuition and the feelings that you have. Like those big spiritual experiences where you feel connections to other people, or you're just overwhelmed with peace and love, or you know you feel emotional or you're in the temple and you feel your mom, who you don't feel anywhere else.

All of those experiences. Human experiences, not Mormon experiences. And they will follow you outside. And you know what? The reason why you feel your mom in the temple is because that's where you [go], because you're Mormon and you go to the temple a lot. If you aren't going to the temple, you're gonna start feeling your mom on your morning walks as the sun comes up. You're gonna feel your mom at her favorite opera. You know, at the most beautiful part. You will still have those experiences. You'll see a beautiful sunrise and you will fill the Spirit, fill you up with joy, and you'll say, “Whew, this is spirituality. I'm having a spiritual experience.”

It doesn't mean that my religion was necessarily true. It just means I'm a human being, having a spiritual experience. And you do not leave those behind when you leave the church. So that is what I will end it with as something I know. 

CW: Oh, gosh. 

SH: Gorgeous. 

CW: Thank you so much. Abby Maxwell Hanson. Thank you, Abby.

AH: It's been such a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. 

CQ: Abby, if people want to connect with you, if they want to find you what's the best way? 

AH: Come and follow Exponent II. We have an Instagram page. There's two Instagram pages for Exponent II –there's a print magazine and there is a blog. And I am the one who works on putting all of our blog content up. So all parts of Exponent II are awesome, but specifically the blog is where I put all of my time and effort into. Go onto Instagram, it's Exponent II blog, and that will take you to a whole group of women. It's a whole big volunteer team effort.

CW: It is. 

AH: You'll find your community there and you'll find your community there. Even if you are the Relief Society President, you will find your people there. 

CW: Wonderful. And we will link to all of that on our website so that people can find it. Thank you, Abby. Thanks, Abby. 

AH: You're welcome.

Voicemail 1: After having my oldest son come out to us, explain that he would not serve a mission and subsequently have a complicated relationship with the church, I have made the realization that missions aren't for the church. They are actually a $10,000 shibboleth spent by families to guarantee their children's lifelong membership and status in the church.

And here's the thing. I get it. I would've happily paid $10,000 for that feeling of a guarantee too. And if you ask me, honestly, I probably still would. Unfortunately, that isn't on the table for me. So while I sit through farewell after farewell and homecoming after homecoming this summer, I hold space for it and for all of my friends who are doing it while also seeing it for exactly what it is.

Voicemail 2: I wanted to share one of my favorite Sunday school lessons that I remember as a teenager. It was led by the bishop at the time. He ended up sharing what he called his failure mission stories where he felt like he had failed as a missionary. And you would think that'd be a bummer, right?

Because you know, it's not the miraculous experiences that you see in the best two years or the other side of heaven or whatever. But I loved it. It just humanized the mission experience so well, and I still think of it and he's still one of my favorites past bishops just for being open about his failures.

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